Wellness Misinformation: Read This Before You Believe Another TikTok Health Guru
Does that TikToker know more about ADHD than your doctor? Should you be worried about fluoride in the water? Should you trust the influencer challenging the system? Or the system that’s both flawed and built around checks and balances?
Media-literacy expert Matthew Johnson knows the answers. Johnson, the Director of Education at MediaSmarts, a nonprofit that promotes critical thinking, has some solid advice: When you’re confused about health information, verify the source before verifying the facts.
Once upon a time, media was difficult and expensive to create and distribute. Now it just takes a few clicks of a button. This means the critical thinking and media literacy skills you learned as a kid might not apply anymore.
Johnson told us that when he was young, “We could rely more on obvious clues about reliability [in the media]. We had the leisure to do a close reading of every news source.” Today, however, nobody has time to verify the facts in every story they come across. “There’s good evidence that that leads people to make worse choices because it’s overwhelming,” he said.
Psychology has something to say about this, too. Even if we identify something as false, we’re persuaded by exposure and repetition. That’s why Johnson recommends checking out the source before you act. “If you find that it’s being run by a hate organization, you don’t have to interact with them at all.”
Verifying a Story
Our relationship with the media has changed. “People have what academics call a ‘news finds me’ attitude. They don’t go to news sources,” Johnson told us. “And that means they’re usually getting it from an intermediary, not from the original source that was reporting it.”
Johnson said that, in the U.S., sources that were previously reliable, impartial, and basing their content on the best available evidence are now being changed for ideological reasons. “I think that’s going to do an immeasurable amount of harm. One of the things we know from the study of trust is that when trust is lost, it’s extremely difficult to regain. So when we lose the ability to point to these and count on them to be honest brokers, it really punches a hole in the fabric of our information ecosystem.”
The first step in verifying a piece of information is to find the original source of the claim. If you saw a post on social media, did it come from a peer-reviewed medical journal? A field expert? Or is the source murky? If you trace the claim back to a source you already know is reliable, you’re done! If not, you can try looking at other reliable news sources you already trust to see if they’re reporting the same information.
“We’ve always recommended that people look for the consensus among experts on a topic and look for multiple sources. So it can be very valuable even if your first stop might have been an American Government website – what does it say on the Canadian, UK, or EU website?”
Finally, you can use fact-checking websites like Snopes to see if someone else has already verified a story.
Authenticity or Expertise?
The internet allowed people to share their personal experiences online in the hope of helping others. But if they share those experiences as facts that aren’t backed up, that can be a sign they aren’t a trustworthy source.
“People turn overwhelmingly to online sources. There is a general trend toward judging reliability based on perceived authenticity instead of expertise,” said Johnson.
One thing that can be helpful for verifying sources online is to understand expertise. “Expertise in science and medicine is highly bounded. When you’re getting advice from someone that’s outside their field, even if they may be a legit expert in [a different] field, their advice might not be that useful,” Johnson explains.
If you’re getting health information online, take the time to understand what forms of science and medicine are regulated. For example, doctors or dietitians indicate a certain level of training in a highly regulated field. Other titles are unregulated, or the level of certification varies from state to state or country to country. You might know that coaches or some alternative health practitioners aren’t regulated. But even nutritionist, which is often used interchangeably with dietitian, isn’t a regulated title in many countries. Osteopathic doctors are medical doctors in the U.S., but Manual Osteopaths are practitioners with regulatory bodies that vary widely from country to country.
This doesn’t mean those people don’t have valuable information to offer, but you should understand their background and what checks and balances are in place to ensure they’re sharing accurate information.
Advice-pedaling influencers might have a huge following, but that doesn’t imply expertise. “Influencers create parasocial relationships,” Johnson said. “They make themselves feel like they’re your friend and they’re on your side. By critically and consciously engaging with those tactics, you can know when you’re being manipulated.”
Continue Challenging the System
Identifying something as a reliable news source, “doesn’t mean that everything they publish is 100% accurate,” Johnson explained. “You can be critical of stories it chooses to cover and not cover, through headline, through who they choose to quote, and what statistics they choose to use. It’s very much the same with medical and scientific authorities. We do have to acknowledge that they have by no means a perfect record, especially when it comes to historically marginalized groups.”
People from groups who have historically been discriminated against and left out of media stories might feel like they have more resources now that give voice to people like them. For example, someone with a rare illness might have an easier time locating online information from other patients about their disease. It’s always important to call on traditional news organizations or medical authorities to do better.
MediaSmarts has a program called Break the Fake, which is all about teaching four quick and easy steps to verify and debunk media sources. It’s worth it for the House Hippo commercial alone – now go verify that claim!
